Arthur Erickson's Concrete Trevor Boddy

I first heard Arthur Erickson speak of the importance of The Constructed Landscape: concrete to his designs in the late 1970s. As the student charged with organizing lectures at my architecture school in Arthur Erickson’s Concrete Calgary, a first talk there by Canada’s most prominent modern architect was my top priority. I called his office, but Erickson’s personal secretary informed me he no longer gave lectures to universities, only to “bankers and chambers of commerce.” I persisted, and arranged to have the Vancouver- based designer speak to a luncheon gathering of downtown businessmen. One of Erickson’s phrases in his talk that day cycled around my student brain long after he got on the airplane back to Vancouver, and the Calgary businessmen got back to pumping oil. While I did not recognize it as being so at the time, he voiced a widely-quoted shibboleth as an aside: “Concrete is the marble of the 20th century.” The use of concrete Trevor Boddy validated through comparison with a now-expensive traditional material? The reference seemed archaic to me, in part because my architectural history studies had just taught me that the ancient shores of the Mediterranean were the last home to marble used as both structure and finish for public buildings. Or was Erickson inferring something more complex with this, as in late Roman and post-Renaissance uses of marble—a veneer finish, while bricks or cheaper stones did the structural work behind, a composite in the same way steel reinforcing rods make large span and thin shell concrete structures possible? Arthur Erickson’s concrete buildings demonstrate both of these tendencies—an extension of building logic of the material itself, and a classicizing sensibility, especially in their spatial logic and recurring use of the trabeated frame. Erickson had extensive exposure to the buildings of the Mediterranean, extending his modest post-graduate travelling scholarship from McGill University into nearly two years of looking and sketching there, starting with Egypt and the Levantine, then returning through Turkey, Greece and Italy. Evergreen Building Conservation Plan, Vancouver 2006. Teaching at Oregon then the University of British Columbia, of these rough-textured concrete frames gradually diminishing the first decade of Arthur Erickson’s architectural practice was by a half meter as they rise from grade to penthouse, the glass almost entirely post-and-beam houses made out of ever-cheap line held constant. Of course, there is less need for structure and always-plentiful BC fir and cedar, beginning with a as the building gets higher, but any rational engineer would modest 1953 studio-house for painter Thomas Gordon Smith. have repeated the same detailing and depth of frame all the A second studio-house for Smith a decade later is one of the way up, an approximation that would of course saved on definitive works of Pacific Northwest modernism, the rhetoric customized design and formwork costs. But the intentions of of large timber post-and-beam extended heroically. this construction detail are entirely architectural, and the result is a lightness of form and presence of a tower with so vast a About the same time, Erickson and then-partner Geoff cubage of cast concrete. Massey won the architectural competition for Simon Fraser University, an all-new institution on a mountaintop bench in a A large concrete office block with a comparable quality of Vancouver suburb. Concrete was the material of choice for heaviness made light is Clorindo Testa’s Lloyd’s Bank the series of academic pavilions and site-works there, but each building in Buenos Aires. Neither Testa nor Erickson are building was achieved by other architectural firms in Brutalists in the British mode of, say, Denys Lasdun. While association with Erickson-Massey, for the usual political all three architects clearly share an admiration for the late reasons of spreading the bounty of commissions around, and works Le Corbusier—and Testa worked briefly at the rue de because their young firm had never done a public building in Sevres—Erickson’s classicizing impulses drew him away from concrete, or a public building of any kind, for that matter. heavily textured concrete treatments in subsequent works.The Oversight of a dozen large structures using a wide variety of egg crate elevation of MacMillan-Bloedel are not, as some concrete finishes and structures was Erickson’s best possible have suggested, a mere multiplication of the monk’s cell post-graduate course of study in the use of the material, and elevations of La Tourette. he demonstrated a remarkable maturity when his own practice shifted almost entirely to the use of concrete. Allusions to vernacular traditions embedded subtly in concrete frames are central to Arthur Erickson’s masterpiece, While there was an association of record with another the 1976 Museum of Anthropology at the University of British architectural firm for it, too, Erickson’s concrete innovations Columbia. The institution houses one of the world’s most im- are first declared in one of the most remarkable concrete portant collections of Pacific Northwest native art, and office towers built anywhere during the 1970s—the MacMillan- Erickson cued off the monumental hewed cedar dwellings of Bloedel Tower on Georgia Street, in downtown Vancouver. British Columbia’s Haida and Kwakiutl indigenous peoples. Dominated by an extraordinarily deep egg-crate frame, this is This is particularly evident in the concrete frame of the great a slab tower in two slightly displaced wings, the elevator core at hall there, sized to accommodate even the largest of conserved centre. Vancouver is in the same seismic zone as San totem poles oriented to face the ocean, as was their traditional Francisco or Los Angeles, but the structural overkill of this siting. Because of the constant availability of large dimension massive frame has more to do with classical memory than timber from the surrounding temperate rain forests, native earthquake resistance. The frame of MacMillan-Bloedel’s peoples in this region used wood extravagantly, often floor-to-floor egg-crates are trabeated—horizontals flush with extending beams far past columns, or setting up large ceremo- verticals. The classical sensibility of this squaring-off of the nial portals and carved entrances. frame is amplified in Erickson’s use of entasis, with the depth Erickson’s UBC Museum of Anthropology great hall uses a amongst the first of the truly global architectural practices. series of portal frames in cast concrete, each larger than the last stepping up to a structural glass wall looking out to sea. The informing idea of the Simon Fraser University The extravagant extension of the inverted U-shaped beams design—that of a huge concrete building that aspires to the past the column line is, of course, more rhetorical than scale and conditions of landscape itself—re-asserts itself in structural, an allusion to similar details in the aboriginal another landmark Erickson design of the 1970s. The Meso- house-fronts much more than mere exploitation of a American ceremonial city of Monte Alban, near Oaxaca, structurally ‘free’ cantilever. The architectural effect of these Mexico, had served as Erickson’s historical precedent for an cast-in-place concrete frames, however, may read better as axial university on a mountaintop. For his second academic propylaea than communal Haida dwelling. The past few years campus commission at the University of Lethbridge, a 3 km- have also seen a revealing debate about the cleaning of the long early 20th century timber railway trestle across a wide somewhat stained exterior surfaces of the great hall portals. river valley served as point of departure for an entire university Some would wish these brought back to the gleaming original conceived as monolithic mega-structure. From student condition of fresh-poured concrete. For some of us, including residences through labs to classrooms and faculty offices, all the architect, the stain patterns and mild moss growth there university functions were combined in this single bridge- are a welcome patina of age, the re-assertion of the power of building. Early schemes extended the Brutalist detailing and nature and the logic of the site on even so bold an act of heavy concrete frame of McMillan Bloedel, but with the con- architectural imagination. crete surfaces flattened and smoothed out, in part because Erickson came to understand the much brighter and harsher A similar argument could be made about Erickson’s Alberta light, which renders even fine textures and reveals continuing interest in Asian architecture. Erickson saw crisply, amplifying their architectural effects, meaning there wartime service with British Intelligence in India, spent a year was no need for the textured concrete heroics of the British after the war in Southeast Asia, and made some career-shaping Columbia projects. visits to Japan in the early 1960’s. The architect suggests the Torii Gates and the extensive throw of temple eaves he saw Arthur Erickson’s notions of building-as-landscape are then were influential to his design thinking for the museum condensed in a second, equally remarkable downtown and the other projects which followed. While the building Vancouver building, one which both resonates with the was constructed with glulam beams and mirrored glass, MacMillan-Bloedel tower, but shows a tempering Erickson’s Canadian Pavilion at EXPO 70 in Osaka was influence from the architecture-as-landscape thesis he awarded the top pavilion prize and widely admired by fellow developed during the fifteen years after Simon Fraser architects—Tadao Ando told Erickson and I that this building University, but applied here for the first time for a densely- was a key influence on his new architectural practice in that developed urban core situation. Vancouver lawyer John city.

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